Unearthing Lead Service Lines: An Operational Geospatial Data Platform

An estimated 6.1 to 10 million Lead Service Lines (LSLs) in the United States will require upwards of $47.0 billion to replace given existing methods. With the high costs and data challenges associated with LSL identification, and the multi-decade replacement backlog, the EPA is seeking innovative technologies to increase operational efficiency of LSLR programs and enable data-driven prioritization of high-risk communities to better protect public health. Unearth Technologies has developed the “OnePlace” Geospatial Work Management Platform which is currently used at some of the nation’s largest Utilities to map and inspect underground infrastructure and has achieved an average 31% reduction in project costs, and 37% acceleration in completion timelines. It is a proven, field-first, bring-your-own-device (BYOD) cloud solution that is rapidly deployable and secure. This project seeks to investigate LSLR Program data challenges at five public water systems to better inform development of innovative algorithms and collection methods to automate the identification, processing, cleanup, and standardization of variety of bulk structured & unstructured LSL data, making it available and actionable for LSLR Programs within the “OnePlace” Platform. Operational efficiency improvements start with data integrity and availability, requiring innovative data algorithms and methods to automatically collect, digitize, and operationalize data. The OnePlace Platform is designed to be data, hardware and IT ecosystem agnostic, promoting data interoperability and flexibility; Competing technologies have foundational architectural limitations requiring specific data formats and structures, making outside data sources complex and expensive to operationalize. Equally critical to efficiency improvements is field adoption of new technology. Competing technologies weren’t designed as field-first applications, which is why we built a field-first consumer-grade UI with a geospatial backbone to support field adoption.